Worse than a Girl, Better than a Woman: apparent misogyny in M/M

by Damon Suede

Young writers are often told to "write what they know." I have my
own doubts about the utility of this timeworn advice. With my
students I've always told them it's much more important to know what
you're writing. I have great faith in imagination, and so (at times)
does the world.

Still, there is fierce irony in the application of this advice to
M/M as a genre since it is primarily written by women and its
central concern is homosexual romance between men. What is a female
M/M author to do? Obviously I am not suggesting that women cannot
write men any more than men cannot write women, but rather that in
fetishizing male homosexual relationships for a primarily female
heterosexual audience opens a (fascinating) can of worms with regard
to gender, stereotyping, and authorship.

When you think about it, M/M walks a strange gender line. Sprung of
slash and suckled on Yaoi, M/M focuses adamantly on the romantic and
sexual relationships between men, though it is primarily written by
and for women... women who create and control imaginary romances
between men who by their very description challenge the value and
values of the patriarchy. That's a strange state of affairs, but no
stranger perhaps than the hetero-male obsession with lesbianism from
the authentic to the ridiculous.

Like all genres, M/M flirts with certain clichés. Certain
relationships recur and refract with metronomic frequency:
gay-for-you plots, hurt/care, secret crushes, family rejection,
single parents, blackmail. M/M fans joke about them and its authors
probe certain topics and questions constantly: how to make a
character believably male but attractively vulnerable; how to
formulate a homoerotic relationship that resonates and titillates;
how to dramatize a relationship between two men for an audience that
is overwhelmingly female; how to build a family unit without a
central woman; how to permit female characters to participate in
plots without casting them in their traditional (and traditionally
limited) roles; how to evoke and specify sexualities that may only
be familiar as fantasy to their creators. As a fiercely loyal
descendant of traditional romance novels, gay romance fiction retains many
of the genres more formulaic elements: the Meet Cute, the mismatched
couple, the Happily-Ever-After ending, melodramatic tearjerker
complications, and above all the dominant charismatic Alpha male.

That last, the Alpha Male, creates a weird problem for women
splashing around in the shoals of homosocial intimacy. Think about
it. If you're going to write an Alpha Male character, what are you
going to do with that other guy? Yeah HIM, the guy that Mr. Alpha
McMuscle is sleeping with and falling for. It's like the question
asked of so many gay men by well-meaning relatives: "which one of
you is the girl?"

At one extreme, some authors of gay romance strike a precarious double-Alpha
balance: two butch men who are mutually attracted and mutually
satisfied as a result of their emotional interdependence and their
versatility. At the other extreme, authors pair the Alpha male with
his polar opposite: a delicate passive boyish receptacle for all
that testosteronal mojo... in effect a feminized man who sticks
pretty closely to the Mills&Boone heroines of the last century. Most
gay romance titles fall somewhere in between these two options, but the
public's appetite for Alpha Males and
emotional access makes for strange textual bedfellows.

The strangest manifestation of this tension is a phrase that appears
(with minimal variation) over a number of authors and titles in M/M:
"worse than a girl." Emotional, flirtatious,
vulnerable moments/actions are endlessly categorized as female, and
specifically girlish (i.e. young and female) with a kind of flippant
disdain for the idea of girlishness and "girlish" behavior by men.
It's uncanny how often those exact words ("worse than a girl") or
variations thereof recur in gay romance publishing.

Let's break that down. Romance authors write to produce appealing
protagonists and the formulaic Alpha Male is plunked in the middle
of the generic landscape. The readers' desire for emotional access
(and thence vulnerability) requires certain events and behaviors
assigned to female characters in traditional hetero-romance. In that
romance you're writing, who's going to cry and suffer and hope and
submit and pout and pine? Your protagonists, of course. Except
they're guys, right? In fact they are guys who love and are loved by
other guys, so they can be sensitive.

These characters have to feel
and they have to express their feelings and they have to allow other
characters to attend their feelings. That's one of the big appeals
of LGBT romance for its fans. At a certain point, the rock-hard cop
or the grizzled sergeant or the smoldering cowboy will and
must
behave in some very non-Alpha ways. Strong men weep, and here they
often weep for/with/on another strong man. At a certain point, these
monolithic macho men must express vulnerability and simultaneously
maintain the strength that is the reason for their existence and
appeal.

So inside the story, these strong-but-emotional men will re-assert
their maleness to themselves, their fellows, their readers...
shaming themselves back into their strong, silent roles as Alpha
males the simplest and swiftest way. They ridicule the
non-Alpha-male behavior by consciously identifying it as such. Over
and over in gay romance fiction, heroes snap out of these emotional or
vulnerable moments declaring that they are "worse than a girl."
Again, it's worth underlining that M/M is a genre written primarily
by and for women. Further, that the genre is built on certain
generic expectations including Alpha males, emotional access, and
the absence of women from the central romantic narrative.

The flipside of the "girlish=bad" equation appears with
gay romance
characters newly awakened to erotic potential of other men
(manly=good). In gay romance fiction, Alpha Males repeatedly discover that
the man in bed with him is "better than a woman."
The kissing, the conversation, the companionship, the fucking, et al
is "better" than they have found it in past with women in
heterosexual intercourse/relationships. Again, a pretty clear
fantasy in a genre based on eroticizing male relationships.

Of
course it's better with a man in
these books because the contrast makes for more conflict and higher
stakes. Consequently, this discovery is one of the most common
themes in LGBT romance stories, a straight man who finds out he's been
wasting time with the ladies, and that what he needed was an
experience outside the box, something forbidden, a
convention-defying rut-buster neither he nor his community could
have expected of such a man's man. To wit, a MAN's MAN.

That's not to say that gay romance is inherently misogynistic, but rather
that it seems that much of gay romance writing expresses a deep mistrust and
offers harsh criticism of traditional female roles. The girls that
heroes are "worse than" seem more like the stereotype of girlhood,
and the women that these "better" male/male couplings supplant are
the traditional ideas and roles with which women are saddled.

Fans
of the genre often remark on their impatience with female
characterization in traditional romance fiction... joking that "two
hot men are better than one." But the role of female characters in
gay romance remains a bit of a briar patch. Often female characters are not
only subordinate in gay romance fiction, they are downright marginalized,
lobotomized, or demonized because they serve
in roles.

On one hand, it makes sense that in focusing on men who love each
other and have sex with each other, that ways of introducing drama
and conflict would often rely on the familiar soap-opera tropes of
divorce, infidelity, family rejection, single parenting. Many of
these situations involve women by default.

It stands to reason: if
you want to introduce an infant character, who is the mother? If
your hero is divorcing someone, who was she? If his parents appear,
who did the childbearing? The core relationship
in gay romance fiction is between those two (or more) fellas. By necessity,
women in these stories tend to slide into the ruts of sympathetic
friend or castrating bitch. Over and over in gay romance we see shrieking
harpies angry at their betrayal by "the degenerate faggot(s)" in
their life and kooky, supportive gal-pals who want to watch
television while they snuggle sexlessly on the couch with their
hot-but-unavailable BFF..."all the good ones are gay!"

Totally logical, if the female character is
nice she supports that manlovin' and cannot and would not intrude
with her own sexuality. If she's not nice, intrusion is the order of
the day, complete with near-rapes and/or tantrums and/or
recrimination because the evil female always wants to wreck the
protagonist and anyone else caught in the self-righteous
heterosexist crossfire.

It's hardly surprising. The sexual charge in gay romance is by definition
situated between the male protagonists, so the women at their
margins run the risk of disrupting the dynamic at the genre's core.
They are noise in the homoerotic signal. What's the simplest solution for an unsteady author?: female
characters must be defused, desexed, or dismissed... either as
unattractive castrators or as loving-but-nonthreatening bystanders.

In less sophisticated gay romance, shaky authors often ape hostile misogyny
as they attempt to wring as much conflict and drama out of their
characters as romantically possible. The hacks of M/M fiction jump
into the woman-as-robot clichés feet first: female aggressors
assault, libel, and manipulate protagonists with sociopathic focus
and detachment... loving female friends devalue, denigrate and
martyr themselves to help the lovers reach their happy ending. It's
unsettling and a little depressing in a genre primarily written and
produced by and for women, but crudely dramatic. Clichés über alles;
the same is true of lazy hacks of all eras and genitals. More
sophisticated authors find ways to humanize and integrate adult
female characters into their narrative organically; their books are
unquestionably the better for it.

Authors of gay romance literally control their fictional men in startling
nontraditional relationships. They control not only their gaze and
desire in ways that a lot of the world finds distressing or
distasteful. These books are romantic fantasy predicated on pretty
rigid gender lines, but repeatedly LGBT romance titles explore serious
themes: tolerance, recovery, healing, counseling, responsibility,
community, family, integrity. Like other "women's genres" like soap
opera and movies-of-the-week, gay romance fiction hammers at sensitive
topics with fierce determination. The simple fact of gay
protagonists means that many authors will default to storylines
sprung from real and volatile politics. In a popular "trash" genre
that crosses class and cultural lines, that's astonishing.

There's a truth in all this, swimming under the surface... a
mistrust of stereotypes, an awareness of erotic and emotional
potential, a sense of sentimental irony, a belief in exploration and
acceptance, a world that permits people to live free of formula
without being formless. Any female author who can identify a male
character's behavior as "worse than a girl" and homoerotic coupling
as "better than a woman" obviously has some feelings about
"traditional" girlhood, womanhood, male authenticity, and gendered
behavior as a whole. Like literal, real-world gay men, women resist
and resent the roles in which they are cast, the subordination to
which they are subjected, the power which they abdicate.

It seems like gay romance hinges on this strange seductive truth. And like
many marginalized genres, there seems to be a spark at its core,
fanned by its fans, changing the world one mind at a time.